The Nonlinear Appeal of the Mosaic Mind
We’re geared to worked through a piece of writing in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, from scene 1 to scene 2, from chapter to chapter until we reach the conclusion. Outlines and all our school training subtly or directly encourages this. It gets us stuck. A lot.
Because of that, I’ve long battled this solely linear approach to drafting and revision.
Magical leaps in a piece of writing, which often happen for me at revision but can also be part of drafting, live far from the path of linear tracking. Have you experienced that phenomenon of being unexpectedly surprised and delighted by what’s on the page? When you read it again after a time away from it, and you’re amazed? Even wonder, did I really write that?
This magic, in my view, is as vital a part of the creative process as the ability to track linearly.
Role model
My mom was a pilot in her twenties. She served in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program in WW II. Pilots rely on extensive pre-flight checklists. Before take-off, they make certain all is working. They are drilled in how to solve unexpected problems in the air, such as air pockets, weather shifts, changing conditions. They log their flight plans before take-off so everyone knows their route.
Pilots are expected to travel in a predicted pattern from departure to arrival. So how was my mom a model for nonlinear creativity?
Yes, she was very smart. She was a good pilot. But from the stories I heard growing up, she had to use her gut sense, many times. Once, landing her plane when her engine caught on fire. Another, when she got lost in airspace over West Point. Her extraordinary linear brain absorbed all that training and used every skill she learned to stay alive during the years she flew, but she also employed a backup plan when logic didn’t fly—her intuitive, nonlinear sense.
Dual-patterned thinking entered in her domestic and work lives, after she quit flying to raise four kids and work full-time at the local university.
As she aged—she passed a few years ago at age 98—her mind moved more to meandering. I wonder if it felt like logic went rogue on her. Lost its usefulness now that she was grounded. Or if she secretly delighted in the more intuitive, random approach.
It didn’t always please me, though. I needed both. Talking with her on the phone in the last years of her life, I’d be thoroughly disconcerted when Mom switched to a completely unconnected topic without finishing her previous thought. I guess I was living more linearly then, unable to appreciate the meander.
Mosaic mind
After she passed, I began to remember her mind and memories as a mosaic, a piece of art where each section is connected to the adjacent one, but if you wanted, the viewer could skip clear to the other side. Like crossing a stream on stepping-stones. This is the technique I began using in my revision—not just the linear but the random. I was astonished at its success in tapping my more intuitive brain.
A mosaic makes sense once you step back. In art, it’s essential to view the whole as well as the parts, and revision is that way too.
You revise individual scenes and each must make sense in themselves, but they also must cohese within the whole story. Mom’s aging brain taught me how to see this big picture, where everything connects to everything else, even though it’s far distant.
Yes, I know the aging brain can give a sense of disability, but now I see it as something different. And how to use the skill of meandering for my creative life.
Value of meandering
We are trained to know where we’re going before we get there.
I remember years of writing outlines for drafts and revision, coming up with lame linear answers because I felt forced to finish. Wishing for more magic, more intuitive leaps—because I knew how much I loved these as a reader.
Not long after Mom passed, a colleague told me about Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. Alison’s theories clarified my belief that the linear approach in story-making is only what we’re trained in, but it’s not the only approach. She calls it masculine in nature, following Aristotle’s thesis of beginning to middle to end providing the emotional catharsis readers (or viewers) need.
Alison presents the more feminine meander as another option.
The meander is “a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens,” she writes.
Unexpected ideas, the real magic of revision, come to me not in a straight line. They appear as I meander. As I do my due diligence to the story, sitting down to work on it every day, yes. But even more often, after I’ve put in my time, they arrive when I’m not focused on solving a problem—maybe when I’m walking or working in the garden. Not paying attention. Looking out of the corner of my eye.
That’s when I capture the real freshness that brings me delight as a writer.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read this great article in The New Yorker about Jane Alison’s approach to meandering.
Is there an area of your draft or revision that feels overworked, too logical, too labored? Would it benefit from some nonlinear meandering?
Play with this on paper. See if you can brainstorm ten non-logical solutions for this scene or chapter. Beyond what your linear self or outline dictates, what could possible happen to bring freshness and the unexpected?